Dwayne McDuffie, RIP: Championed Diversity Among Champions : Monkey SeeDwayne McDuffie was more than a writer of comics and superhero cartoons — he was a voice for change in a medium that reflexively resists it.

Comics writer Dwayne McDuffie, seen here earlier this month, died Tuesday at 49.

Rodney Williams-Itier/WireImage

Dwayne McDuffie was a guy who made a living writing for comics and TV. If you don't know his name, your friends who read comics do. If your kids have watched cartoons in the last decade, they've more than likely seen some of his work.

His individual contributions as a writer and producer, which I'll get to in a bit, remain impressive. But McDuffie was more than a writer, he was a voice — a passionate proponent for change in a genre (superhero comics) that reflexively resists it. And it's that voice that will be most acutely missed.

He started out in the '80s as an editor at Marvel before leaving to do freelance writing for DC, Marvel and Archie. In 1993 he co-founded Milestone, a company dedicated to "expanding the role of minorities both on the [comics] page and off..."

There, he launched several new characters, most notably Static, an electromagnetically-powered black teenage hero. (The character went on to star in the Saturday morning series Static Shock, which ran from 2000-2004.)

He wrote for the Cartoon Network series Justice League, and when that series underwent a change in format to become Justice League Unlimited, with a new focus on the deep bench of DC heroes and villains, McDuffie became a story editor. In recent years, he continued to write for comics like Firestorm, Fantastic Four and Justice League of America (where he beefed up the roles of black heroes in the JLA roster).

Most recently, he scripted the just-released, direct-to-DVD adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's definitive, 12-issue All-Star Superman series. And he did a fantastic job, capturing the whiz-bang, idea-a-minute tone of Morrison's story while finding and delineating its emotional through-line.

In a brief blog post, Church neatly deconstructs and dismisses the "Dwayne wrote about characters first, race second" meme that started making the rounds immediately after McDuffie's death.

"[McDuffie] brought the experience he had as a black kid growing up in Detroit in the 70s and 80s to every project he got his hands on by choosing directly not to emulate what he'd seen in the comic books he read, but by creating what he wished he had read," Church writes.

I wasn't reading comics in the '90s, so I'll leave it to others to speak to the specifics of the Milestone books.

But I'm of the generation who got turned on to superheroes in particular and comics in general by television. If it hadn't been for reruns of the '60s Batman show and Spider-Man cartoon, I might never have taken a second look at the spinner rack of the West Goshen Book and Card Store, back in 1973. And sealed my fate.

Which is why McDuffie's work on shows like Justice League, and especially Static Shock, has a special importance, and it's what I'll remember. His characters had personalities, not outsize personality disorders. They were heroic because they chose to be, not because it was their job. Race was dealt with matter-of-factly, but it was dealt with.

A new generation of kids who watched McDuffie's work saw worlds full of heroes — worlds that looked a lot like their own, and heroes that looked a lot like them.

Monkey See is all about pop culture, aspiring to be both a friend to the geek and a translator for the confused. It's hosted by Linda Holmes, who can be reached via Twitter or our much more formal contact form.